I sat there a while, alone, with the chicken I had cooked under duress now cooling in front of me, and I ate some of it, because I was hungry and because I had made it and I would be damned if it went to waste on his account.

And I let myself feel, for the first time in a very long time, the strange lightness of a person who has set down a weight so slowly that she had forgotten she was carrying it.

The house was quiet — genuinely quiet, not the held-breath quiet of waiting for his mood to turn, but the real quiet of a place with no one dangerous in it.

My grandmother’s house.